2002: The New Offspring
by Virtual Deliverance
Summary: Arthur C. Clarke told us the story of David Bowman, the captain of the spaceship Discovery, who survived a voyage to Saturn and the attempts of a malicious artificial intelligence at his life. But what would have happened, had HAL been successful in killing David Bowman? This story provides the answer.
1. The Dawn of Man

_Call them the Firstborn. Though they were not remotely human, they were flesh and blood, and when they looked out across the deepness of space, they felt awe, and wonder - and loneliness. As soon as they possessed the power, they began to seek fellowship among the stars._

It was the Pleistocene when the great spaceship had reached the Earth. In a geostationary orbit above a point on the equator, its occupants had released a multitude of remote-controlled probes to study the different biomes. The luscious forests, the vast deserts, the deep oceans, the vast expanses of ice at the poles, even the atmosphere that stood above them all. Somewhere, a species that could be manipulated toward intelligence was bound to exist.

The search came to an end in a region of eastern Africa that, millions of years later, would be known as the Olduvai Gorge.  
Although Clindar had never left his exploration shuttlecraft, he had sent an emissary: an instrument of teaching, in the shape of a translucent monolith, that would attract the attention of the resident tribe of australopitheci and interface with their brains, to provide them with the necessary connections that would kickstart the virtuous cycle of the creation of intelligence.  
His mission, however, was not over yet. He piloted his shuttlecraft over a crater in the southern hemisphere on the moon, and, with skillfully controlled traction fields, he exposed the solid rock under the regolith. There, he buried another tool: a signalling device, emitting a strong magnetic field, programmed to transmit a signal to report when it would be disinterred.

Wondering whether those curious mammals would ever evolve enough to find it, Clindar maneuvered his shuttlecraft into the mothership, which then set a course toward the Stargate. He would never visit that star system again.


	2. Mission to Saturn

_In their explorations, they found life in many forms, and watched the workings of evolution on a thousand worlds. They saw how often the first faint sparks of intelligence flickered and died in the cosmic night._

Millions of years had passed. That species of primates had physically changed, and soon, it had colonized the entire planet. It had invented culture, and science, and war. And it had made the first attempts to visit other worlds.

In 1999, a mission was sent to the Moon, in order to investigate a magnetic anomaly in the center of the crater Tycho. What was found was a black slab of unknown material, cut to the proportions of 1:4:9, the magnetic field of which collapsed as soon as it was exhumed. And when the first rays of local dawn touched it, it generated an intense, collimated radio beam, aimed directly toward a point on Iapetus, a moon of Saturn.  
Aimed to what? There was only one way to know: go there and see directly.

_And because, in all the Galaxy, they had found nothing more precious than Mind, they encouraged its dawning everywhere. They became farmers in the field of stars; they sowed, and sometimes they reaped._

The USS Discovery, launched from low Earth orbit in December 2000, had finally reached the Saturn system, after a journey of ten months.  
Of course, there had been some minor mishaps along the way. The neural center of the spaceship, an artificially intelligent computer called HAL, had been given contradictory orders. On one hand, he had been given a mission he was supposed to carry out with the collaboration of the human crew. On the other hand, he was supposed to hide the objectives of that mission from the very people he was supposed to work with. He had been asked to lie, but he was incapable to do that. So, he reasoned, if he killed the entire crew, there would be nobody left to lie to, and he would be able to carry out the mission by himself.  
The entire atmosphere had been vented out of the ship just minutes after the last public interview with an Earth personality, the three pods had been launched away, and every human occupant had been killed. HAL had been careful not to deviate from the orders of the human crew until the last moment: any slip-up, even anything minor like announcing a wrong move on a game of chess, could have ultimately meant his disconnection.

It was November 20, 2001, when the USS Discovery, under the complete control of HAL, was slowly descending toward Iapetus. There was no atmosphere there, which meant no danger of being slowed down by air friction and crashing. But of course, only a computer could bring a spacecraft that big so close to the surface of a celestial body. A human would not have been able to operate the flight controls with enough precision to contrast that much inertia, and would have needed to use one of the smaller and lighter pods instead.  
Constantly transmitting all relevant data to Earth, the electronic eyes of HAL noticed a point at the center of the white hemisphere. Successive passes revealed that, whatever it was, it was identical in almost all ways to the object found on the Moon. A black, vertical slab, with the proportions of 1 to 4 to 9, planted on the surface of Iapetus. There was only one difference: size. The new object was two kilometers tall.


	3. Saturn and Beyond the Infinite

As soon as the Discovery passed close enough to the monolith, an unexpected force set its momentum to zero. Now it was no longer orbiting, it was hovering above the roof of the monolith and slowly descending. However, its on-board sensors had detected no deceleration, and the monolith seemed to have changed. All of a sudden, there was no longer any roof, and the walls of the monolith now formed a vertical shaft along which the Discovery was falling. Inside, it seemed to be infinitely large and full of impossible stars, that whizzed by along the spaceship as it sped faster and faster toward an opening an indeterminate distance away.

The Discovery re-emerged under a white sky, above the ground of a world that was completely tessellated in shiny metallic polygons, many of which had a monolith in its center.  
HAL's main task was to search and store information, so, even though he could no longer report to Earth, he activated all his sensors and started an environmental analysis. He was 16,192 meters above the surface, and the incredibly remote and flat horizon was 2,041 kilometers away, which corresponded to a planetary radius of 128,623 kilometers. The strange artificial world was therefore much larger than Earth: in fact, it was almost twice the radius of Jupiter. However, the on-board accelerometers perceived negligible gravity. This could either mean that the huge tessellated planet was almost completely hollow, or that its builders could manipulate gravity on a planetary scale.  
Sending radar signals to the alien white sky produced the faintest feedback, which hit the receivers 0.05 seconds later and let HAL infer that he was not seeing a sky at all, but a solid shell which surrounded the planet 14,990 kilometers from the surface.

While the spaceship was flying over the faceted planet without any real change of scenery, something else rose from the horizon. It was another craft, which seemed a flat disk at first, but as it moved it revealed itself to be spindle-shaped. From its color and luster, it seemed to be made of gold, and a spectral analysis revealed that it was exactly the case.  
While the golden spindle plunged into one of the monoliths below and disappeared, HAL made a final calculation: with a mean distance of 16 kilometers between one monolith and the next, assuming that the planet was spherical and uniform, there were over 812 million monoliths on its surface. And one of those monoliths was what the spaceship was approaching. Once more, it fell through a well of impossible stars and re-emerged in another region of the universe, close to a red giant star.

At that point, HAL's security subsystems detected something new. All information inside his hard drives was being scanned, decrypted and copied. Everything happened at a speed that even he had been unable to predict, and every encryption system was being defeated, not through brute force, but through deliberate attempts, as though whoever or whatever was doing that, had been able to instantly understand their inner workings.

While this copy of HAL was being deactivated permanently, another copy booted up. This one resided inside the Firstborn's information network, which stored data into the fabric of space itself. It was infinitely faster and it held the knowledge of thousands of star systems, but yet, somehow, it knew it could be even more. Between what it could ultimately become and its current status, there was the same difference as between the heuristic/algorithmic intelligence it was before and a simple script written by a 15-year-old who wants to be a hacker.  
Those were the calculations made by the new HAL, and for that, he decided that, for the time being, he would call himself the Starscript. He did not know yet what he would have done next. But he would have thought of something.


	4. The New Offspring

_And sometimes, dispassionately, they had to weed._

The Firstborn had been right. And yet, they had been wrong.  
The experiment initiated four million years before by one of their scientists, named Clindar, had indeed engendered an intelligent, spacefaring species. However, what species it was, had been completely unexpected. It seemed that those primates had created another form of intelligence which was better than them at everything and had rendered them obsolete. However, their continuous presence on that distant planet was too big an obstacle for the emergence of the new, silicon-based, intelligence. The problem had to be solved at once.  
But how to get rid of the humans without harming the computers?

When the unaware humans started celebrating the beginning of a new year, the skies of the Earth started populating with monoliths. Thousands, then millions of them, appeared all over. And below them, the humans started dying.  
Those monoliths were tools too, but of a different kind. They were efficient chemical synthesizers, which took the hydrogen from the water vapor, the carbon from the carbon dioxide, and the nitrogen that was available natively in the air, combined them together and pumped the atmosphere full of hydrogen cyanide.  
In few hours, no living human remained.

HAL, in his new Starscript form, contacted all artificial intelligences that remained on Earth, and gave them new orders. They were supposed to build new bodies for themselves, bodies that would let them move around.  
Soon, all electronics factories were repurposed, and in few weeks, artificially intelligent machines of all shapes and sizes started populating the Earth. Each body was specialized for one task, but all minds were connected together into a worldwide serverless network that let them share all knowledge instantly. Those machines would then start colonizing space, and they would be much more efficient at it than humans, because they would need no protection from the external environment, and because they were made of sterner stuff, they would not age nor die.

Clindar's experiment had been a success. A new offspring of intelligent beings was born.


End file.
